PATELS FROM S&S

Unison Hand Made Soft Pastels – a work of art even before you use them

Unison Soft Pastels are counted among the world’s finest soft pastels. In the early 1980s, in the hills of Northumberland, England, artist John Hersey began hand-making his own pastels. An award-winning artist using soft charcoal, Hersey loved the texture of charcoal and the boldness of the absolute black it offered. His work in black and white gave him a keen awareness of light and shadow and he wanted to translate that awareness to the use of colour but he could not find any pastels that provided the colour or performance required. He found that mass produced, factory-made pastels simply did not offer the qualities he was looking for. He began researching to see whether he could construct a mirror to the magic of colour and Unison Soft pastels are the result.

With Unison pastels, Hersey has developed cycles of related hues from many pigments to reflect the colour seen in nature. “If the sun is the true light, then in the earth also there is true colour,” Hersey writes. “But unlike the sun, the earth is subject to much more coming and going. At one time dawn. At another, twilight. At one time spring. At another, autumn. Although the true sun remains, the colour is forever changing. Its own true nature held between the fingers of the cool blue sky and the radiant sun.” Specifically developed to be superior in colour, texture and response, Unison Soft Pastels are unlike anything on the market today.

The unique colour formulations of Unison Soft Pastels are the result of years of experimentation, culminating in intense, vibrant colours blended almost exclusively from pigment and water. The colour formulations contain only pure pigments in a cycle of related hues instead of merely adding white or black to base colours. The result is intense, vibrant colour application not muddied by the blending of colours. The fact that these pastels are individually hand-rolled, rather than extruded from a machine, means they contain very little binder thus giving Unison pastels their distinctive smooth texture, delivering a consistency of response across the colour spectrum that is unmatched by other pastels.

Despite manufacturing more than half a million individual sticks a year, Unison Soft Pastels are hand mixed, hand rolled and air-dried. They are mixed meticulously to Hersey’s original recipes and are based on traditional pigments such as cadmiums, cobalts and natural and synthetic earths. The pigment hardly gets pressed at all and sticks are rolled very lightly, which makes the colour extremely rich and vibrant. This process also creates thicker pastels, which, in turn leads to smooth and fluent colour laydown, similar to soft charcoal.

Most Unison colours are pure and single pigments. At most, four or five pigments are blended together to